Marriage and Arguments in Taiwan
My parents disagreed about everything, including China. Is that changing now?
I t was the third day in a row that the company had a power outage. Typhoon Tim had wiped out several utility poles and cut off power supply in Songshan, Taipei. It was 1994 in Taiwan. There was no internet. Cell phones at the time were chunky black bricks that would cost a quarter of your salary for the monthly bill. Raymond Hung and Oliver Liu wouldn’t have known about the power outage without arriving at their company. “It’s like God’s giving us dating leave!” said Raymond.
It was July, and the air conditioner in Raymond’s patchy iron-gray Ford Telstar had a refrigerant leak. Raymond and Oliver had been keeping the car windows open to keep it cool during the sticky Taiwan summer. As on most of their dates, they drove off to Tamsui riverside, sat by the riverbank and chatted. There was never anyone else but them. All they could hear was the river and their chatter.
After a year and a half of dating, Raymond and Oliver got married. In anticipation of the Y2K glitch, they decided to start planning for pregnancy. In 1998, Oliver gave birth to their first child, me. Four years later, after Y2K came and went, she gave birth to my brother.
Raymond was working in the Chrysler division of an automobile dealership company at the time. His work required him to be on frequent business trips; he was away from us a lot. The company covered his meal expenses whenever he went on a trip, but he would save it to buy baby formula and diapers for his newborns. Five out of seven days, he dressed up in suits and rode in luxury Chrysler sedans to meet clients and talk business over lunch at fancy restaurants; at night, after work, he returned to his blotchy Ford Telstar, had dinner at roadside eateries and picked up household essentials using the excess from his meal quota. To him, it was worth it for the stability of his family. What was most needed then was money, and money brings stability. He believed that his hard work would eventually pay off. It wasn’t until I was in the third grade that Raymond could come home more often.
One would think that this is the happy ending of the story. It is not. Instead, this is the beginning of a never-ending fight. Raymond and Oliver fought over all kinds of things — from what time to shower and where to sleep to where they would send their kids to middle school. As the oldest child, I have grown accustomed to the midnight disputes, the morning-after silent treatments, and the responsibility to comfort my brother by telling him that they will not divorce, even though I, myself, was not so sure.
Politics is one thing I didn’t see them argue about often. My mom is a non-partisan voter. She supports gay rights and is a firm believer in a self-reliant Taiwan, which makes her views align with that of Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) more often. My dad supports the Kuomintang (KMT), the conservative nationalist party that founded the state after fleeing to Taiwan after their defeat in China’s civil war. Despite that, over the years, the KMT has become more friendly toward China. It’s complicated.
Arguments between my parents came and went, but they flared up during times of controversy. In 2018, a national referendum on gay rights and what name our country should appear under during the upcoming Olympic games sparked heated discussions inside and outside my family. In Olympics past, Taiwan had appeared as Chinese Taipei; the proposal asked that the name be changed to Taiwan. In terms of gay rights, the proposal was to legalize same sex marriage and include content about homosexuality in primary school textbooks. My mom supported both initiatives; my father opposed them. In the 2018 referendum, my father’s side won.
In 2019, when Hong Kong erupted in protest against Chinese restrictions, my mom came out strongly for the DPP position, which was to support the rights of people in Hong Kong to have control over their legislation. What happened in Hong Kong has been a cautionary tale for most of Taiwan. So, in 2020, when the presidential election took place and the DPP won, my father kept quiet. But I worried that this peace between them would not last.
F or people in the West, Taiwan is mostly known these days as a country that makes excellent superconductors and may one day be invaded by China. This is true about Taiwan, though reality is much more nuanced.
In 1949, the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, having been defeated on the mainland by Mao’s People’s Liberation Army, fled across the Taiwan Strait to the island of Taiwan and declared it his new capital. He promised to someday return to the mainland and defeat the Communists. In the meantime, he established martial law in Taiwan and prohibited all forms of activity that could threaten the stability of the KMT regime. Communism, in particular, was banned. Chiang Kai-Shek lived until 1975, but martial law persisted. It was not until 1987 that the government finally lifted martial law and started liberating and democratizing Taiwan.
Since the end of martial law, the relationship between China and Taiwan has fluctuated depending on the Taiwanese ruling party and their national policies. One argument between the DPP and KMT is over whether they still want to reclaim the title “China.” The KMT believes that it still represents the real China — one reason it may not want to change Taiwan’s name in the Olympics from “Chinese Taipei” is that it would lose the word “China.” The DPP, meanwhile, advocates for a distinct Taiwanese identity and a clearer separation from the Chinese mainland. Scholars writing about Taiwan have pointed to (understandable) national “anxieties,” and the country’s unclear and sometimes unstable “sovereignty.”
This national ambiguity and anxiety has, according to scholars, also affected attitudes around gender roles and masculinity. Taiwanese society retains old habits of military culture from the martial law era. Military service remains compulsory for all men in Taiwan and military training is often a venue to enforce compulsory heterosexuality, misogyny, and homophobia. Although military service has become more routine and less aggressive over the years, nursery rhymes and popular songs are still imbued with militaristic themes. Men are also still considered “the default breadwinners’’ who must prove their economic strength and play “the role of securing Taiwan’s position from being undermined by China,” as the scholars Kao Ying-chao and Bih Herng-dar wrote in “Masculinity in Ambiguity: Constructing Taiwanese Masculine Identities Between Great Powers.”
There have been many times in the past where tension between two sides escalated. When the first presidential election was held in 1996, it was treated in China as a significant provocation. According to the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China (Taiwan), “The president and the vice president shall be directly elected by the entire populace of the free area of the Republic of China.” This definition indicates the existence of territory, citizens, and government in Taiwan, and that Taiwan is in fact a country — one with a comprehensive political structure and legitimacy, which therefore draws a line between us and China. This act infuriated Beijing. As a result, China launched missiles onto the Taiwanese coast during our first presidential election.
After Xi Jinping became China’s leader in 2013, he has made multiple attempts to expand his country’s control over Asia, especially in Hong Kong and Taiwan. A decade ago, the then-ruling KMT attempted to push through a service trade agreement with China. It resulted in what became the largest scale of protests since 1990: a twenty-three-day-long occupation of the legislative building in Taipei by at least 11,000 people, many of whom were students now known as the Sunflower movement.
The movement provoked an awakening for the Taiwanese. According to a survey conducted by the Election Study Center of National Chengchi University, the increase in identifying as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese” started in 2008, peaking once in 2014 and again in 2019, when the protest against the Extradition Bill took place in Hong Kong.
Taiwan and Hong Kong have always shared a strong bond in facing pressure from China. Not long after the Sunflower movement ended in April 2014, the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong began. Many have said that the Sunflower movement in Taiwan motivated the Hong Kong Umbrella movement, and vice versa. As mentioned earlier, the 2019 protest in Hong Kong against the Extradition Bill also prompted solidarity in Taiwan against China, leading the DDP to a landslide win in the 2020 presidential election.
Tensions between China and Taiwan continue to come and go. In January of this year, Lai Ching-te of the DPP won the presidential election. The next month, a Chinese speed boat came too close to one of the islets of Kinmen, an outlying island of Taiwan, and began to be chased by the coast guard. As a result, the boat capsized, causing two Chinese nationals to drown. While accidents like this are common, China responded with unusual anger, claiming that “there is no such a thing as ‘restricted waters,’” according to Taiwanese officials. China announced that it would be sending its own coast guard to monitor those waters. Experts are concerned that this is a first step toward attempting to exert control over the outlying islands of Taiwan.
In the face of such challenges, the DPP’s consistent stance to resist China has been reassuring to constituents. On the other hand, KMT’s strong economic ties with Chinese businesses have rendered them untrustworthy to Taiwanese citizens. What can be said, however, is that none of Taiwan’s political parties are in favor of what China calls “unification.”
I t was probably summer, maybe almost autumn. I can’t recall the exact month, but my brother said none of us fell asleep because of how loud the century-old air conditioner unit was in our sixteenth floor apartment.
I remember my mom waking me up in the middle of the night. She told me that we could no longer stay in the house. I followed her downstairs and as she opened the door to my dad’s study, there he stood: I smelled cigarettes, saw smoke, and felt the cold air that welcomes you when stepping into a fully air-conditioned room.
My mom said that was not his first time smoking so heavily in the house. My mom was furious and felt we could not stay there any longer. We went out seeking accommodation at motels nearby our house, but we were denied because, apparently, at the time, there was a rash of suicides in Taiwan carried out by single parents with their kids checking into motels. So we ended up back in the apartment on the sixteenth floor.
We were in the process of moving out of that three-bedroom apartment to the four-story house that would probably be a better fit for the four of us. The apartment was actually almost empty, except for a few unmoveable pieces of furniture. We laid on a mattress without pillows and blankets, fully awake–my brother and I–because of the loud noise coming out from that decaying air conditioning unit; my mother, because of the fight she had had with my dad about him smoking in the house.
After that, my father only smoked outside the house.
That was as bad as it ever got, at least as far as my brother and I remember. It’s possible there were fights that we never saw. In any case, they always made up eventually.
Once I got old enough to have opinions about things, I found myself often teamed up with my mom against my father to try to convince him of our point of view. We argued for the gay rights referendum in 2018, explaining how gay people should be allowed to get married. We tried to get him to vote for the DPP in 2020–our candidate was Tsai Ing-wen, the first woman president of Taiwan, who was running for re-election. She had, in my opinion, done a good job so far; in her first four years, Tsai legalized same sex marriage, despite facing strong opposition from the public, and advocated for Hong Kong when China was jeopardizing the safety and autonomy of their people.
I had friends who were going through similar arguments with their dads. My friend Wu Yan, who is bisexual, has had major conflicts with his parents over their support of KMT’s anti-gay agenda. To him, the problem is generational, and he hopes to stop arguing with them eventually. “I don’t like playing piano to the cow,” he told me recently, using an expression in Mandarin, “And my dad is the cow.”
I’m not entirely sure that it is generational, though.
“Sell goods, bring in the crowds, make good fortune in Kaohsiung,” shouted Han Kuo-yu as he broadcast his slogan to supporters on TV in our living room. Han Kuo-yu was a candidate for the mayor of Kaohsiung City promoted by the KMT in the 2018 election. He was a colorful politician with a shady past who also advocated for closer ties with China, as a way of warding off their advances, he claimed. Within months, he rose to fame, winning election in that longtime pro-DPP city. Two years later, he ran for president. His slogan was “Peace for Taiwan, money for the people.” He lost the election, and was recalled from his mayoralty. But old fans of his still hold a soft spot for him. Or, at least, my dad does. A troubling thing about Han Kuo-yu is that young people like him, too.
Han Kuo-yu could almost be considered a Taiwanese Trump. There was something about him that charmed Taiwanese citizens. His emphasis on making the economy better and acknowledging that people’s hard work had not been coming to fruition resonated strongly with Taiwanese voters. My dad called him “down-to-earth,” unlike other politicians. He was willing to listen to his pitch about closer relations with China. My dad’s reaction to Han Kuo-yu is when I started to realize that I might have a conservative-leaning father.
For my mom, it has always been very important to stand up to China. She was very upset by the images coming out of Hong Kong; she doesn’t want her kids to live in a world like that, a world in which China decides what people can and cannot do. My dad has a different perspective. He does not want Chinese domination either, but he thinks that the way to keep them out is to keep them happy. “I am voting for the candidate that will trigger China the least,” he says. “Maintaining a friendly relationship with China is the only way they’ll leave us alone.”
“I want to thank Taiwanese people for writing a new chapter in our democracy. We have shown the world how much we cherish democracy,” said President Lai to the domestic and international press in a press conference on January 13 of 2024. In this year’s election, Lai won the election with forty percent of the vote share–a mere seven percentage points ahead of the following candidate. This is the first time since 2000 that no candidate won over half of the votes in a presidential election.
Looking at the voting for parliament this year, DPP received roughly the same as in 2020, whereas the Taiwan’s People Party, founded in 2019 by Ko Wen-je, who was also a presidential candidate this year, received almost double the votes compared to 2020. A poll in 2023 showed that Taiwanese people have been leaning more towards “maintain[ing] the status quo indefinitely” when it comes to our relations with China. Austin Wang, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, who specializes in voting behavior, East Asia, and political psychology, analyzed the situation this year. Wang found that China has become far less of an influence for voters compared to 2020.
Back in 2020, the memory of President Xi’s repression of protests in Hong Kong was still fresh. More recently, however, President Xi has been much less vocal about threats toward Taiwan. China’s military exercises have remained within its national boundaries and they even released some of the detained Taiwanese held in far away prisons to avoid attention. More than that, after the end of COVID-19 lockdown, China also started promoting economic reforms while nothing new was announced regarding cross-strait relations.
The growth in support of the newly founded Taiwan’s People Party signifies Taiwanese’ frustration with the current situation. In the past sixteen years, the major parties have traded time in power, but nothing about Taiwan’s situation has changed. “So they [the voters] thought, ‘Perhaps it’s just gonna stay this way. Why not put our attention on issues other than cross-strait relations?’” said Wang. “They think that cross-strait policy is not something that Taiwan could make a call on.”
Nojima Tsuyoshi, a Japanese reporter who has been closely following China-Taiwan relations, called this election one “without winning or losing” in a recent article. Taiwanese voters carefully balanced out the power of the three parties in the government. President Lai, from the DPP, won the presidency, but the KMT holds the most seats in the congress. As a result, both the U.S. and China have reason to be happy. According to Nojima, this shows that, “Taiwanese people have decided to postpone the moment to make the final decision. This is definitely leading to an extended game. And this extended game is the election in 2028.”
“Everyone could have different interpretations on these election results,” said Wang. “International press may say, ‘The pro-U.S. party won the election!’ But for many Taiwanese, the reason they cast the vote might just be as simple as ‘I like this mayor’ or ‘I support same-sex marriage’ and has nothing to do with China. Now that we have this data and knowledge, we should be able to better understand what each vote meant for individual Taiwanese voters.” China, for the moment, may not be as top of mind for people in Taiwan as it is for politicians in the United States.
Raymond’s alarm goes off at 8:25 a.m. every weekday. He sets the alarm five minutes before the pre-market session starts to make sure he does not miss out on any change in the stock market. Without as much stress from his work as before, Raymond has adopted this morning routine of checking the stock market before he heads out for work.
On weekend mornings, Raymond usually sleeps in but he will brew a pot of his favorite Taiwanese mountain tea and pour it into two cups: a cup for him and another for Oliver.
In the last year or so, my parents seem to be getting a little closer to one another politically. Raymond, for example, has started re-thinking his ideas about same-sex marriage. “I valued heredity so the whole same-sex marriage just didn’t make sense to me,” he said recently, of the 2018 referendum. But since same-sex marriage became legal anyway in 2019, he’s noticed that it hasn’t made a great difference to him. “Now that it’s legalized, I realized it doesn’t affect my life as much. So, I would say, just let them be.”
On the question of China, too, they are growing closer together. Although Raymond is still more KMT-leaning, he tried to balance his votes in the presidential and congressional election this year. The same is true for Oliver–in recent years, she has felt like the DPP was depending too much on the Americans. This made her worry. “Ultimately,” she said, “we have to find ways to rely on ourselves instead of the great powers. Neither of them is thinking of our own good.”
Raymond and Oliver have recently been going on hiking trips every weekend. It has become one of their favorite memories together. They go on Saturday mornings, around nine to ten o’clock, when the sun isn’t too bright and intolerable, so that they can be back just in time for lunch. Lunch could be Raymond’s favorite dim sum, or Oliver’s beloved oyster vermicelli, or “just anything we feel like having at the moment,” said Oliver.
“The only thing that will never change is that things are always changing,” my dad likes to say about the stock market. Secretly, I hope things stay the way they are.
